Featured Tracks:

Many young producers are ditching the minimalistic beats and hollow, gray dub textures that dominated dance trends for much of the last decade in favor of something bigger, brighter, louder, greater, and all around more, more, more. For these maximalist-minded artists, traditional melodic structures are never enough: Why not have six synths playing three melodies out of step with each other, and throw a cluster of guitar and drum solos in there, too? It's a trend that parallels rapid advancements for both digital production and consumption. It's also the perfect soundtrack for a current generation who live (and, sometimes, dance) on the internet. In terms of scope and notability, these producers run the gamut from big-box (Skrillex, Rusko, Dillon Francis) and small-scale (Lunice, Damu, the cross-continental Night Slugs/Fade to Mind crew).

Over the last year, Glasgow's Russell Whyte, aka Rustie, has been a key figure in this loose movement due to his ingenuity and raw talent. While likeminded fellow Glaswegian and Warp labelmate Hudson Mohawke offers a colorful take on disparate strains of hip-hop and R&B, Rustie's manic, overstuffed work defies categorization. It's dubstep, it's hair metal, it's jazz fusion, it's pop played at 140 bpm, it's the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack, it's classical music filtered through the bombast of Southern hip-hop's grandest moments-- all of which could be happening either separately or all at once.

Both of his official releases for Warp, 2010's Sunburst EP and last year's singular Glass Swords, sound something like being locked inside an arcade that's harnessing its electricity from the sun. Glass Swords is way too much fun to listen to, like overdosing on sugar-- but it's a lot to take in, too, and perhaps best enjoyed in controlled doses for potential motion-sickness victims.

That potential for sonic overload might make some listeners feel trepidation when approaching Rustie's contribution to the BBC's long-running Essential Mix program. As is Essential Mix protocol, Rustie's mix runs just a little under two hours, which will prove a mind-boggler of a listen for many. But though it nearly triples Glass Swords' running time, it's also, weirdly, more compulsively listenable. If you have two hours to spare, take the plunge and find choon after gob-smacking choon. And if you got shit to do, that's fine-- just jump to any random point, listen for a bit, and leave wherever you like.

Though it seems like all his fingers are on 10 different buttons at once, Rustie's Essential Mix is several cuts above because of how expertly paced and curated it is. The wide variety of material culled for this mix-- much of it unreleased-- can be divided into three large categories: dreamy, gold-glistened synth bangers, the type of bass-rattling beat workouts that shake fillings out of teeth, and a selection of R&B and hip-hop both new and not-too-new that's accompanied by Rustie's distinctive production touch.

He drops a ton of his own new material too, work ranging from a-thousand-sunsets gorgeous ("Reflector") to the type of flaming-keyboard workouts that he seemingly pulls off in his sleep ("Cat Nip", "Frazzle", "Ooompa"). Rustie's stuff wows, but he's willing to cede the floor to other euphoric up-and-comers, from Dorian Concept's fat, juicy synth-walloped remix of Cid Rim's "JazzJazzJazz", to Lone's latest slice of beatific rave revivalism, "Dream Ache", to "R U Ready", a cooking dance-worthy slice of head-fuckery courtesy of Hudson Mohawke and Lunice's promising TNGHT project.

Tracks arrive with the expected chaotic abandon but the flow is what makes the set work, from the gorgeous, sighing "VIP" version of Rustie's own Glass Swords cut "City Star" that breaks up a particularly dark and clubby run, to Rick Ross's titanic "The World Is Ours" steamrolling through the mix's opening minutes, flattening the awesome ostentatiousness that preceded it. The whole thing breathes evenly, which gives Rustie plenty of space to go wild elsewhere. Everything's a sound effect with this guy-- wolf noises, stoned exhortations, 8-bit video game samples, creepy helium vocal samples, Trapaholics mixtape drops, creepy giggling, and Kanye West, whose presence on this thing is exactly as "HANH?!?"-filled and fitting as you'd expect it to be.

Kanye shows up twice on Rustie's Essential Mix: once in vocal form, on your favorite weed carrier's weed carrier Big Sean's "Marvin Gaye and Chardonnay", and once behind the decks on his recently circulated remix of Cassie's "King of Hearts". Both sound better here than they do isolated-- the latter's aided greatly when paired up with the Glass Swords highlight "Hover Traps", but the former's low-end oddball charm is given new life here, a previously mediocre tune that's finally found a home. Within 24 hours of when this Essential Mix went to air, Kanye's new single with 2 Chainz, Pusha-T, and Big Sean, "Mercy", also dropped-- which featured an "additional instruments" credit given to Hudson Mohawke. Kanye's interest in this new maximal wave of electronic music makes a lot of sense-- why wouldn't the guy who loves The Biggest Things want to work with young guns that are just as sonically greedy?

On a more genre-wide level, though, Rustie's Essential Mix draws a line tying electro-maximalism's pilled-up attitude and modern hip-hop's own druggy eccentricities. The yo-yo hook behind A$AP Twelvy's "Our World" fits in so perfectly that the line between where it ends and Rustie's own "Eyezz" begins to blur, while Wiz Khalifa's "Guilty Conscience", which appears in the middle of the mix's closing third of Rustie-contributed explosives, provides one of the set's more glassy-eyed moments. Perhaps the biggest surprise here is the appearance of Destiny's Child's 1999 single "Get on the Bus", featuring a start-snap production job from Timbaland that sounds so "now," it serves as a bittersweet reminder of how ahead of the game this guy was at his prime. The fact that almost all of the hip-hop and R&B cuts that appear on this mix remain untouched, yet still contribute greatly to its uniformity, speaks greatly to the texturally varied sonic patchwork that Rustie's weaved here, comparable to DJ /rupture's Uproot in its functionality as a primer for different sounds existent and being made all over the world-- as well as a killer party playlist, too.

Rustie clearly values an off-the-moment sort of chaos, the idea that it's possible to travel from point A to point B and make a thousand zig-zag pinball-machine detours along the way. That's how a lot of people live these days. As a snapshot of a young artist seizing a moment to offer an overview of a scene, Rustie's Essential Mix is the most perfectly taken picture. As a pure, positive, party-hardy mega-statement on digital (and music) culture's total stimulus overload, it's a joyously fun trip.